This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 88-89. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
Public Service Announcement: If you feel strongly affected by chapter 89, and do not yet have first aid training, consider googling a local class and signing up. Some sudden deaths can be prevented, and it might need to be by you. Make the most good out of your horror and revulsion.
First aid kit as curiosity stopper. Treating it as more a checkmark on a list of things responsible people have, and not an item that causally interacts with the world.
And thus, Hermione Jean Granger was permenantly sacrificed in a ritual which manifested Harry Potter.
This is a very powerful demonstration of how the sudden death of a single loved friend affects one more than the horrible, slow torture to death of a thousand strangers in Azkaban.
This applies to Harry - but I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about myself and all the readers now expressing their pain on reddit.
A single death is felt differently from a thousand deaths. At least in fiction...
Y'know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix -- but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn't get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people -- but if anybody died [by his opponent's hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he'd been thinking about how Batman's ethics only come off as good if you don't care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.
I'd kind of hoped that Harry would be able to actually go through without a death, and failing that I kind of expected that it would be some random NPC's death that would change things -- but I don't think that would actually have worked to justify Harry's future actions to the reader. [ETA: I guess buybuydavis is right too that, even more importantly, it wouldn't have worked as a statement against death.] It really does need to be somebody we (the readers) care about in order to carry even a fraction of the emotional impact that death should carry.
(Tangent: As a preteen, I read 2001 up to th... (read more)
When I first read the end of the chapter, my thought was that Quirrell hadn't arranged the incident; he had thought it was a "surprisingly good day" which suggested to me that he hadn't expected the troll.
After reading comments, I became less sure about that; someone suggested that Quirrell might have simply not intended for Harry to be at the scene and in danger. This seems plausible, but one thing still makes it difficult for me to believe it was Quirrell.
The troll had been enchanted against sunlight:
And Harry transfigured part of the troll:
But before, it was stated that Quirrell could not charm something that Harry had Transfigured:
For Quirrell to have been behind this, I can see only two possibilities: 1) Harry can transfigure something Professor Quirrell ... (read more)
Harry transfigured the inside of the troll. Maybe Quirrell only needed to enchant the outside?
I'm sad now.
Those of you who didn't read canon before reading this, there's a corresponding incident in the first book which I think would add to your understanding of this incident. Quirrell sneaks a troll into the school, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione are improbably able to defeat it using the first thing the Weasleys try here (smacking it with its own club). The difficulty level of that encounter was clearly calibrated to the characters' strengths in a way common in heroic stories and I think Eliezer was deliberately subverting that expectation. (He's made this point in the sequences on a few occasions - something about how it's allowed for Nature to just throw problems at humanity that are too hard for it - although I can't find a quote at the moment.) I particularly appreciated how Harry only used tools that he had deliberately prepared in advance, sometimes way in advance, e.g. the healer's kit.
I also wonder where Fawkes was while this was happening. You'd think he would've found his way to either Harry or Hermione.
I have a mild complaint about all these cameos. Some of the names of the people who end up getting cameos don't fit in the Harry Potter universe to my ear and they stick out really noticeably. One of the first things I'd do if I were hypothetically rewriting HPMoR for publication is to come up with a consistent and meaningful naming scheme.
I think it's ironic that at the begining of the update, Harry refers to Filch as a "low-level random encounter whom [he] often breezed past wearing his epic-level Deathly Hallow".
I predict that it will be revealed that Quirrell or a closely related entity has been abusing Harry on and off throughout his life, to try and make him into a Dark Lord.
He can go to Harry's house like the time he played Father Christmas.
Obliviated memories leave residue, which is how in Chapter 88 the twins remembered that they could find people, in the castle, but couldn't remember how.
In the first chapter, Harry noticed that he believed in magic.
In chapter 16, Harry is almost reminded of something when he looks at Quirell, but can't remember what. And when Quirrell is first introduced, Harry ominously recognizes him
... (read more)I don't know about this, for a couple of reasons.
1) If there was a time turner involved, why do the issues with Harry's sleep schedule persist even after he gets to Hogwarts and gains a time-turner of his own?
2) If someone spent a two-hour period of time abusing Harry and then time-turnering it away every day, wouldn't he get tired two hours early nstead of two hours late? That is to say, wouldn't his sleep cycle appear to be 22 hours instead of 26?
My interpretation is that all of these are symptoms of Harry's dark side (which is the backup copy / horcrux of Voldemort somewhere in him).
This is an intriguing hypothesis, but are you aware that Eliezer also has this condition? I was under the impression that he was working off of his own experiences here and nothing more.
I think the simpler "conscious Horcrux inside Harry" theories are ruled out by the sorting hat: "I can tell you that there is definitely nothing like a ghost - mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings - in your scar. Otherwise it would be participating in this conversation, being under my brim."
It is possible that the original, canon Harry has been completely replaced by Voldemort, or that the Horcrux has merged with Harry to form a new single personality. The sorting hat is also explicit that it does not remember previous students such as Tom Riddle as individuals. Therefore it would not notice if HJPEV were in fact Tom Riddle redux. However there's just one person in Harry, not two.
This is interesting. From the end of Ch. 89:
From Ch. 46, after Harry destroys the dementor:
Every day that Harry kills something is a good day, of course.
Without endorsing any part of this comment dealing with events which have yet to take place, I congratulate user 75th who receives many Bayes points for this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6aih
... (read more)Or alternately, somewhere in the literally thousands and thousands of predictions or claims (I have ~200 in just my personal collection which is nowhere comprehensive) spread across the 20k MoR reviews on FF.net, the >5k comments on LW, the 3650 subscribers of the MoR subreddit, the TvTropes discussions etc etc, someone got something right.
You know perfectly well that one does not get to preach about a single right prediction. He had the opportunity to make more than that prediction, and he failed to take it.
He also predicted that Hat and Cloak was Quirrell, Santa Claus was Dumbledore, and S. was Snape. He considered these predictions blatantly obvious as well. I remember receiving ~13 upvotes for arguing that Quirrell could be ruled out as H&C, so it wasn't as obvious to all of us.
All of which were consensus beliefs; do not make the mistake of interpreting upvotes as object-level agreement - you may have received the upvotes for making the anti-Quirrel case well or bringing up some bit that people hadn't remembered or just being funny.
It's a large space, not a binary yes-or-no, so successful predictions are impressive even given a large base. Also I could be prejudiced but MoR is supposed to be solvable god damn it.
Someone was criticized. S/he was right, the critics were wrong. The neural net updating algorithm calls for a nudge in the appropriate direction of "Beware of dismissing those who speak with what you think is too much confidence."
Ha, you've got me all wrong. I am woefully under-read, particularly in fiction. I get a very small percentage of the references Eliezer makes in Methods; most of the time, I find out that he's borrowed something months (or, let's face it, years) after I read it, only by seeing someone else explicitly point out the reference. I have had my life ruined by TV Tropes, but most of what I'm familiar with there is video games, and not too awfully many of those.
But it's not a matter of picking up on specific tropes, exactly. It's more a matter of getting into the author's head. Of constantly asking "If this were foreshadowing or a setup or a clue, what would be the most effective payoff?" I read Chapter 84, and then, put together with many other quotes from my many rereads of HPMoR ("Nothing really bad ever happens at Hogwarts", "Her life was officially over", etc.), I answered that question with "Hermione will die horribly," then posted how I felt about it.
It's the same deal with my prediction — which I'm far more certain of than I was that Hermione would die horribly — that Nzryvn Obarf xvyyrq Anepvffn Znysbl. I got into an argument with someone o... (read more)
Arf, didn't mean to start this again, but here's my usual litany:
Gur bayl rivqrapr jr unir gung Qhzoyrqber xvyyrq Anepvffn vf gung Yhpvhf fnlf Qhzoyrqber gbyq uvz fb. Jr qba'g xabj gur rknpg jbeqf Qhzoyrqber hfrq, naq oheavat fbzrbar nyvir ernyyl qbrfa'g frrz yvxr Qhzoyrqber'f fglyr (nygubhtu V jvyy fnl gung Puncgre 89 vf gur svefg gvzr V'ir gubhtug gur Qhzoyrqber-vf-rivy pebjq zvtug npghnyyl unir fbzrguvat fhofgnagvir gb jbex jvgu). Zrnajuvyr:
Jura V bayl xarj nobhg #1, V jebgr vg bss nf n cbffvoyr pbvapvqrapr. Ohg gura crqnagreevsvp cbvagrq bhg #2 gb zr, naq V fgebatyl hctenqrq gur ulcbgurfvf'f cebonovyvgl. Gura yngre #3 unccrarq, naq V orpnzr nf pregnva nf V nz abj.
And if that's not as close as you can actually come to a Bayesian updating process when reading a fiction book, where the only experiment you can perform is "Wait for more chapters and then read them", I would love to learn what's legitimately closer.
I totally get the point of the rest of your comment, but not this sentence. A correct prediction is meaningless because it wasn't accompanied by another correct prediction?
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here; I've gotten things wrong too, and my original comment in question here was much more about expressing my despair at Chapter 84 than trying to register a prediction for later credit. But I don't see how I had any particular "opportunity to make more than that prediction" that I failed to take, beyond the fact that anyone can make any prediction they feel like any time they feel like it.
More or less. Think of it in terms of selection bias: a bunch of people enter a lottery of some sort. After the lottery concludes, the lottery organizer Yliezer Eudkowsky praises the winner, entrant #57, for their deep insights into lotteries and how to guess the winning number and admonishes everyone who told #57 to not get his hopes up. Do we now credit #57 for wisdom and study his numerology? No, not really.
Now, if #57 had simultaneously entered 5 other lotteries and won 3 of them, then we would start wondering what #57's edge is and preorder #57's upcoming book Secrets of the RNG Illuminati. Or even if he had won none of those other lotteries and simply gotten 3 near-misses (5 out of 6 digits right, for example), that would still serve as replication of above-average predictive accuracy and not mere selection effects, and persuade us that something was going on there beyond randomness+post-hoc-selection.
I am breaking my "only comment on LW if you expect some benefit" rule because I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, and I agree with Eliezer that "penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent". See, I made this update at an earlier time under not-dissimilar circumstances. (In short, I thought ArisKatsaris was making an overconfident prediction about HPMoR, bet against him, and lost.)
An excerpt from my journal, 3/28/2012:
So, you know, here's a chance to learn a $30 lesson for free, people.
Ha, interesting take. That last sentence was not actually an endorsement of horrible murderous things happening, it was just my way of saying "Now let's get down to business" about the home stretch of the story.
Counter-evidence: Harry produces blue and bronze sparks at Ollivander's.
As long as we're sticking necks out, though:
... (read more)Definitely: The horcrux technology uses the ghost phenomenon. Specifically, by causing the violent death of a wizard under controlled conditions (i.e., murder) it's possible to harness the powerful burst of magic to make a ghost of the living caster instead of of the dying victim: a backup copy. A ghost may be static data rather than a running instance, but hey, so is a cryo patient.
Definitely: Baby Harry was overwritten with a horcrux-backup-copy of Voldemort. Voldemort didn't plan on childhood amnesia, though, and much of the information was erased (or at least made harder to access consciously). The Remembrall-like-the-Sun indicated the forgotten lifetime as Riddle. Remnants of Voldemort's memories are the reason Harrymort has a cold side; his upbringing in a loving family is the reason he has a warm side.
Mere hunch: In chapter 45, the Dementor recognized Harry as Voldemort and addressed him by name: "Riddle".
Mere hunch: Voldemort may have chosen to impress his horcrux in a living human in order to try to get around the "static data" pro
From Chapter 6:
From Chapter 89:
... (read more)I think I've identified three techniques Eliezer uses to create associations in the readers' minds and promote ideas to their attention.
There's repetition. If you're sensitive to repetition then the repetition will drive you mad. Five false prophets, many uses of Grindelwald's name, and about a zillion instances of the phrase 'the old wizard'. Dumbledore is old, old, old.
There's placing two related ideas side by side. Like Harry wondering how magic could possibly work, then segueing into an 'analogy' to artificial intelligence. (Repeatedly, so it's a twofer.) Or the description of phoenix travel appearing in the same chapter as Harry confronting Dumbledore over Narcissa's death.
And there's the throwaway gag that contains the literal truth. "It's not like I'm an imperfect copy of someone else." "Let me know after it turns out that it was Professor Quirrell who did it."
And, perhaps, "And if you coincidentally crack the secret of immortality along the way, we'll just call it a bonus."
After Chapter 87, I thought it likely that Hermione's primary contribution to the story would be to rediscover the Philosopher's Stone through the application of the scientif... (read more)
What happened to Hermione was shocking and has nearly monopolized the posts in this thread so far.
There's aftermath coming, though, and I'd like to talk about that. Harry is probably in a lot of trouble. Here's a short list of rules violations:
The transfiguration is probably the worst on the list, really. If Harry is lucid at the end of this chapter I expect there will be so... (read more)
Not that it were very important, but actually Harry told Dumbledore to keep the patronus secret, not the other way around.
Also, merely seeing the Patronus isn't the problem. Understanding it is.
I actually expected Harry to cast the Killing Curse as a last ditch desperation/rage effort. He knew what it does, has seen the wand movements and pronounciation (in the Dementor dream), knew and had the required state of mind. That should be enough to cast it, as per Ch26 ("He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.").
The obvious interpretation of this is that spellcasting is a skill like any other, and practice develops it. By giving Harry an implausibly large object to carry, and then having him interact with the Transfiguration professor, Dumbledore can be fairly confident that Harry will try to transfigure the rock into something more reasonable to have in constant physical contact with him. This constant transfiguration practice will help Harry level up his abilities, and a huge rock is predictably useful in combat situations.
He also showed off his unique partial transfiguration trick during combat, which Dumbledore was hoping he would save for the Final Battle.
He threw the troll's head over the wall, so its well away from anyone who could breathe in the gases, and a simple bubble-head charm should solve the problem. Given that the alternative was being eaten, he won't be punished for it (also, the most important thing is keeping partial transfiguration secret - other students would be told that Dumbledore killed the troll).
The twins were going to try to rescue Hermione anyway.
The twins will probably agree to keep the patronus secret.
While Harry and the twins did break a rule which was said to result in expulsion, they did almost save Hermione, which is more that the staff did. Expelling them would lose even more face then failing to follow through on a threat of expulsion would. Maybe McGonnigal will admit that when it comes to military matters, her students know more then she does. Maybe in future emergencies the 7th year generals will be able to countermand the orders of professors.
[EDIT: formatting]
But for your reasoning upthread to work, Harry has to be so sure that the outpouring of magic carried all the information about Hermione that it's not worth it to him to try and protect her brain, and with (a) his protestations that brain damage means that the information must be in the brain and (b) there not being a shred of evidence that I can remember off the top of my head that Muggles require any magic to run (in which case witches/wizards' brains/souls would presumably have to work completely differently from Muggles), I don't think Harry is at a point where he can conclude that the chance of reviving her by saving the body is so low that he should concentrate his efforts on chasing her souly-looking emanation of magic.
Since he traveled there because he sensed her death, that's neither surprising nor contrived.
The Headmaster can feel when a student dies in Hogwarts. That's how he showed up the moment Hermione died.
But the Headmaster can also feel when a creature unknown to Hogwarts is in Hogwarts. That's how he showed up when Harry rejected his phoenix.
But so why didn't Dumbledore feel the troll and intercept it much sooner? I expect before long the Dumbledore-haters — both those in the story and those on Less Wrong and Reddit — will latch on to this as proof that Dumbledore has been evil all along.
The problem is, we know a thing or two about Hogwarts's wards by now. We know, for instance, that Salazar Slytherin was the one who wove them:
Salazar Slytherin's wards. Salazar Slytherin, who left a basilisk that knew all his secrets. Secrets that Quirrellmort now knows.
Dumbledore will try to tell the wizarding world that the only explanation of Hermione's death is that Voldemort was behind the attack. This will be seen by the world as the same thing Headmaster Dippet actually did when Myrtle died: the accusation of an unlikely — "preposterous!" — scapegoat.
And now, Lucius... (read more)
Lucius is going to be outraged and lead an opposition to Dumbledore because the attempted murderer of his son, who he tried to send to Azkaban for 10 years, got killed in Hogwarts? I think that would seem a bit odd to everyone involved.
Lucius has means of his own, and had every reason to arrange Hermione's death.
I haven't visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell's goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the 'house' lines that may have divided them in the past.
It would be counter-productive to prepare tools that could be as easily used by your enemies as yourself. So we may reason that all members of the student armies are already on the side Quirrell wants them on. One thing all members of the student armies have in common is that they are members of Magical Britain.
I have found nothing to suggest international tensions, so a war against another magical nation would be out of place in the text, as I understand it.
On the other hand, Quirrell had a downright emotional reaction when Harry declared his aspiration to be a scientist in chapter 20. After the end,... (read more)
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. Quirrell doesn't seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell's model of the world on several occasions, and based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love.")
Agree that Quirrell doesn't recognize this; agree that Quirrell's model is peculiar in failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love"; disagree that the latter is the reason for the former. I don't think Quirrell would be wrong in predicting that even many Muggleborns will join him.
I haven't been following these threads enough to know whether it's even worth spelling out the obvious theory of what the "power the Dark Lord knows not" is in the Verresverse, but it seems pretty clear that it's neither "love" as in canon nor "science" as Harry suggests (and Snape disputes) in Ch. 86, but Harry's belief that a good future can actually be made to happen (and is worth fighting for), i.e. an interstellar transhumanist rationalist ethical civilization that has left death behind. That may not sound like "power", ... (read more)
I don't think it can be usefully summarized into one punchy word (ETA: I don't think hope is quite the right way to describe what Quirrellmort is missing that's preventing him from creating and ruling over an intergalactic dark empire), but now that I thought for one minute about which one I would choose if I had to pick one, it would be one that doesn't at first brush sound like it fits into that slot at all:
The power the Dark Lord knows not is ambition.
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
Robin often displays unusual confusions. I think that stems from a reliance on his explicit memory over implicit memory. If he doesn't have a theory to account for why society fails to distinguish songs by whether their lyrics are fictional, as we do with literature, then he considers that a puzzle to solve, even if he's never wanted society to draw that category to aid him in selecting songs.
So when Robin asks, "Why do we appear to value X more than Y", he's not making any claim about how he feels about X and Y. He disregards his feelings and intuitions, because they would mask opportunities to improve his explicit, formal, verbal, theoretical understanding.
This distinction between questions as a tool to point out when the audience is wrong and as a tool of apolitical inquiry closely mirrors the difference between questions as requests for favors and questions as inquiries. It's also similar to questions as argumentative challenges vs questions as inquiries.
Had you not heard of Robin Hanson before, and are you now basing your opinion of him largely on that thread? I think this is a bad way to get an accurate impression of a person.
Disliking Hanson is not about....
Um, LW is growing very well, thank you. In fact at this point I'm more worried about the 'unwilling to consider controversial ideas due to signaling' failure mode than the 'stop growing due to being too controversial' failure mode.
If you don't take some time to explore Robin Hanson's ideas in good faith you will miss out on a lot. What you see as a weakness is in fact his great strength as a rationalist. "Curiosity about humans and unconstrained by social norms." You may object, saying that you don't mind this, but any such response basically boils down to "I like X when it isn't too X."
The red flags aren't there because he is unaware of their existence. Indeed I bet Hanson can win quite well at social games. They are there because he systematically relies on his explicit/theoretical rather than implicit knowledge to expose where the gaps of the former are and then tries hard to fill them.
Driving away people who are going to care more about social status signaling than about rationality is a feature, not a bug.
That path will lead you and any you influence to isolation and obscurity.
If you seek only to better yourself then that monastic sort of approach might actually help you out. But if you want to change the world you need to first change your attitude toward social status signaling.
A nice touch when Harry is fighting the troll: When he engages his killer instinct, from then on the troll is only referred to as the "enemy", in one case even with a capital E.
Interestingly, while Harry explicitly mentions "censors off" (concerning no more screening off of potential killing methods), that mode of thinking also engages other filters, dehumanizing (de-troll-izing) the creature he's fighting and only seeing it as "the Enemy".
Two interesting observations: The most recent utterances of the words "temporal pressure" (similar to the titles of these last two chapters) was in chapter 86 when discussing the Halls of Prophecy:
... (read more)I was under the impression that "temporal pressure" referred to some kind of mysterious Fate-like force that occasionally compels seers to release prophecies when important parts of the future gets resolved. That could just be Harry's new resolve to do anything necessary to get Hermione back (in addition to "time pressure" meaning the pressure he was under to get to Hermione on time). Is there a particular reason the "fracturing feeling" needs to be externally imposed rather than, y'know, a perfectly reasonable emotional reaction to current events?
On the other hand, Eliezer has mentioned that he wants to go through common tropes but do them better. He hasn't really done a full-blown Peggy Sue yet, although he's poked fun at the idea, and I'm pretty sure I remember Eliezer saying that he's read Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, which is a Peggy Sue fic in which Harry finds Atlantis and weird things happen involving time, so... (recommended for the awesome ideas, but if you're like me you'll get annoyed by the way Harry talks.)
Although I'm not at all sure it was deliberate (is there a way to submit potential typos?), we may have just gotten some new evidence about the true nature of magic. In Ch 89 Fred/George cast a spell solely from the memory of seeing Dumbledore cast it ("Deligitor prodi"), got the incantation wrong ("Deligitor prodeas"), and yet still achieved an (apparently) identical effect (The summoning of the Sorting Hat). It appears that if this is legitimate evidence rather than a typo, magic has an error bound for the correct pronunciation of spells.
"Prodi" is the imperative ("come forth"), "prodeas" is the subjunctive (here used in supplication, for which there is no precise English translation; perhaps "wouldst thou come forth").
Which itself suggests something quite interesting about the nature of incantations... unless it's not actually an incantation, just talking to Hogwarts in Latin.
Right; I'm using the wards triggering right then as evidence for the souls theory. In a souls world, it's easy to notice when souls exit the body (and set up wards to detect that), and hard to notice when souls are about to exit the body, so you can show up and suspend them or whatever. In a 'people are just computation' world, where you're able to read the computation from afar using magic, a ward that notices "Hermione's not alive anymore!" would require tech that could be used to build a ward that notices "Hermione's going into shock!", which would be a much more useful ward to have.
[edit] I didn't fully remember the wards from the Draco Incident, where they could detect injury. So either there are multiple levels of wards and the injury ward was disabled (or set to death), Dumbledore didn't respond to the injury alarm but did respond to the death alarm (reasonable, if he's somewhere else important, and the Deputy present at the castle would have already known the troll was around and have the castle in high alert by the time Hermione was attacked if she was attacked after Filch's alert), there's a continuity break, or something I'm missing.
Good point, but I'm not sure if the wards triggered right then: Dumbledore said he felt Hermione die, not that the wards alerted him that Hermione died. During the Draco fiasco various characters say the wards are triggered to detect rapid harm to students, which is why they didn't detect the blood-cooling charm (although you'd think that means the wards would have detected what happened to Hermione sooner...). The implication is that if someone hadn't discovered Draco he would have died without the wards detecting it, or at least that's what it sounded like to me.
The wards triggering right then is evidence mostly that somebody is messing with the wards, based on their previous description as being set to trigger on "sudden injury".
After devising a plan for a GNU world order, it's only logical to take the next step up into resilient W2W (Wizard-to-Wizard) networks: add a clause ordering Imperiused wizards to re-infect every 100th wizard they meet. This random crosslinking will convert the efficient yet fragile pyramidal hierarchy into a robust distributed graph.
Most of the plans to use time turning to fix this are massively overly complicated, by the way. Best bet is to swap the oxygenating potion for something which will make her death less permanent.
Which Harry can find or have made in < 6 hours.
Options: 1: Elixir of life. The stone is at hand, Snape is at hand. It is possible that shout is what taking it looks like. 2: Undeath. The potter verse does have vampires, and they are integrated in magical society at least to the extent that seeing one in a bad neighborhood is not grounds for an auror raid. Werewolf infection might also do it. 3: Draught of living death?
I'm ruling that MoR!Vampirism does not indefinitely extend life or Voldemort would be a vampire (HPN20), similarly werewolves do not regenerate or Moody would be a werewolf.
Wild Mass Guessing (that I don't believe in, but would be cool):
When Hermione fought Draco, and cast the Blood-Chilling charm on him with intent to kill, Hat-And-Cloak!Quirrell activated the spell to create a Horcrux of Hermione, which he can now use to blackmail Harry.
That would imply that only an attempted murder can create a horcrux. With the right self-delusion or whatever, one might be able to mass-produce horcruxes and train an army capable of ruthless action at the same time.
The assailant in question introduced a troll through the school wards, enchanted it to resist sunlight, disabled Hermione's cloak & broom, arranged for it to be in the same part of the castle, made the troll eat Hermione's legs to disable her portkey toering, and is apparently responsible for Fred & George no longer having the Marauder's Map which real-time locates every student in the school.
Seriously? Of course the attacker (Quirrel) knew she wasn't in the hall.
When asked to find Hermione, why would Harry's Patronus have found a simulacrum instead of the real one?
I'm mildly surprised no-one has speculated on what Harry will do next. He won't accept that Hermione is dead, and I'm guessing that it will occur to him that transfiguring her into a steel ball and then freezing it (I'm pretty sure there's a spell for that) provides a quick and easy form of cryonics, which as an added bonus bypasses the problem of ice crystal formation.
How to resurrect her is the tricky bit.
I would nominate the Blood-Cooling Charm as a convenient and adequately-foreshadowed first response. Like packing a recently-deceased patient in ice, that will buy her enough time until she can be properly cryopreserved. That is, literally stuffed in the fridge. One of the FFnet reviewers had it right: this chapter was an epic troll.
ETA: Gah! Bleugh. There's just no getting rid of the taste of a wrong prediction. It's like a mouth full of soy sauce.
What exactly does this mean? Both Quirrel and Harry Potter are already here. Sirius no longer seems feasible for this.
Possibly it refers to the new personality-state of Harry which Quirrel just sensed? I suspect that Harry has just succeeded what he failed to do in Azkaban: to fuse his normal self with the grim and ardently indomitable dark side.
Prediction 1: Soon, Harrry will do something somewhat clearly allegorical to FOOMed super AI. Alternatively, Prediction 2: Instead, Harry will be incredibly badass (I.e, Quirrel's equal) more conventionally. Prediction 3: Harry will be able to get some real resources finally. He might somehow get enough mana to pull off Quirrelesque blasting, or find a creative/technological-seeming way to provide it. Prediction 4: Harry's involvement in
The version starting with "HE IS COMING" was given the same chapter and same day that Harry and Draco formed the Bayesian Conspiracy.
Horrible half-prophecies occurred when Harry pondered the distinction between ruthless war and the superhero's quest to save everyone. Th... (read more)
Harry could disassemble the world and the stars into computronium - in fact star-lifting crossed his mind when he heard the first part of the prophecy. EY stated that there would be no AI analogy, and magical intelligence amplification seems more plausible anyway.
A different route to a mini-foom is that one can make luck potions. Then gamble, get money, recruit people who know how to make potions. Now you have huge amounts of luck potion, and provided your thought process is fairly random, you will always find the right answer (e.g. opening a random book at a random page happens to provide exactly the right insight). Routes to magical IA:
Luck potions.
A thinking hat - like the sorting hat, only it uses your brainpower to help you solve problems.
Efficient use of memory charms to spread insights rapidly through a group of researchers.
Use of telepathy to create a group mind.
Potion of thinking, made of e.g. ground-up crossword puzzles.
Possibility: Normal harry and his Dark Side have now merged (or Harry has lost his restraint to the extent the distinction is irrelevant). This new Harry has all his abilities and none of his previous restraint and is effectively a new person, with the expressly stated intention of changing the world that now exists to the extent it is effectively destroyed.
Secondary possibility: The current 'world' will end because Harry is going to somehow turn back time and destroy thus timeline in its entirety.
Not around these parts.
Something else interesting, from Chapter 84:
Grievous bodily injury, unfortunately, is not covered under that warranty.
Also,
Now I guess we know why it started with her legs.
Legs eaten off at the thighs! For some reason this stuff reminds me of the fight scene from the fifth Twilight movie. Here's a great video review describing that scene, it really brought a smile to my face.
It's like a karma Ponzi scheme!
I can't tell whether you mean "this was clichéd and bad writing" or "this made me sad" or maybe even "letting a female character die to motivate a male character is sexist."
1) I did not choose the sex of the characters in this story. Rowling created the roles and assigned them sexes and everything else follows from those roles. If canon!Harry was female, this story would be about Harriet.
2) Hermione is not some random girlfriend who gets stuffed into a fridge. Things that happen to main characters do not turn into fridge deaths because they are female.
dthunt is right. The prominence a female character has in the storyline before her death doesn't really affect whether it is or isn't a fridging. What matters is whether her death is a narratively appropriate end to her story and character arc, or whether her death primarily serves to motivate a male hero and further his heroic journey. (See http://www.feministfrequency.com/2011/04/tropes-vs-women-2-women-in-refrigerators/ for a full discussion.)
Hermione's death was a textbook fridging. That's not to say that it's automatically offensive or sexist or whatever: like TVTropes says, tropes are not bad, tropes are tools. But yes, Hermione's death is a classic fridge death.
Your summary is a much better definition of 'fridging' than the one which appears on TV Tropes and should probably be added there, since TV Tropes is where I went to look up 'fridging' whereupon I was much puzzled by the accusations. But as the application of your definition deals with future events within HPMOR, rather than things which have already happened inside the story, I cannot comment further.
Someone doesn't become a main character just because you write from her POV and pin a literal Hero badge to her chest. You gave her toy problems to challenge, children to fight, and then killed her off before she found something to protect or accomplished anything of note, just to motivate the real, male main character. She's a fridge death.
...unless and until she returns from the dead, in which case you'll have used her death to motivate her. Gosh, I'm embarrassed to have forgotten that death doesn't have to be forever. Even the introduction of the Blood-Cooling Charm wasn't enough of a clue.
Isn't that the point, though? Hasn't that been the theme? That reality doesn't care about the narrative arcs that you make in your head? That at any time, the universe is allowed to kill you, your notion of the plot be damned? What you are feeling seems to be more or less the author's intention - the sign of a good story.
Mind you, if this was the real world. Harry would have found out about Hermione's death 2-3 days later, not dramatically just in time. From a realism perspective, there was way more closure than anyone ever actually gets when it comes to violent death.
I don't know why you think seeing the fight from her side would have made it feel better for you.
I think you're probably just mourning for the character and are angry at the cruelty of the story that depicts a cruel universe which lets people cruelly be murdered (just like our own). You're justifying your anger by talking about the particular details of the depiction -- but I think you're just bloody angry at the murder itself, like Harry is, not anything else.
If that's the case I think the story has been successful in making you feel Harry's anger, though you're misdirecting it. Authors that write honestly end up writing about the moral universe of consequences which they believe exists. An atheist like G.R.R. Martin couldn't write Lord of the Rings, and a Christian like Tolkien couldn't have written Game of Thrones. And this is the story that Eliezer Yudkowsky has to write.
Details like "in the canon the troll was much weaker" seriously shouldn't be affecting your emotional reaction, especially when it's clear that the troll has been boosted in power even in-story (so that it'd be impervious to sunlight), so it was clearly murder and targetted assassination, not just a random troll than randomly attacked Hermione.
This is historically inaccurate. GoT is fairly accurate for the time period depicted (it is based loosely on the War of the Roses). It is practically lighthearted compared to the vast majority of human history.
The Red Wedding, like most of GoT, is based on a historical analogy with the War of the Roses. Specifically, it is a combination of the Battle of Heworth Moor, where a wedding party was warned in advance of an ambush and managed to hire enough mercenaries to survive, and the Black Dinner, where the leaders of a clan were invited to dinner, then slaughtered.
I thought it was a neat bit of subversion where something that would be a joke speed bump mid-boss in Industry Standard Storytelling ends up straight up killing you instead because things work more like reality here and it's ten times as big as you and made of magic.
It is bridge dropping, and I love it. We are being given a taste of a dark rationalist, who does not give his enemies dramatic deaths where they get to die like heroes, perhaps accomplishing something through it. When a dark rationalist takes control of the story (or rather, starts to use the control over the story he's always had), the story becomes contrived, cruel and uncaring, as it should. It's realism.
See also Fate/zero & Kuritsugu. And note that it's not just Hermione's death that is fast and cruel, it's the troll's too: Harry steps forward with the stone, stuffs it in, releases it to explode the head, and acidifies the brains in less time than it takes to type that.
Actually, there's a great rationality quote for here:
Harry thinks this. In general it's not a good idea to assume that authors agree with everything their characters think, and Eliezer has explicitly pointed this out on several occasions.
I think this was deliberate. Have you read the piece Eliezer wrote about his brother?
So there's already a resurrection ritual that Harry has heard about. Blood of an enemy, bone of the father, flesh of the servant. Can he find these things for Hermione?
Anyone else confused by the line in chapter 89:
On first reading I thought it was the as-of-yet-unnamed-but-totally-Hermione victim, which seemed odd, but on a third read I think it might be Harry, and the distance of the narration just a reflection of Harry's horror. Not sure, though.
Quirrell thinks Harry will take the gloves off now and accomplish goals like gaining power without any hesitation. Whatever Quirrell is up to, it seems like he wants Harry to gain power. Quote:
Recall that Harry said the following to Quirrell in Chapter 66:
Those two obstacles to Harry trying plots have now conveniently been removed!
Some of the melodramatic parts have already been proven right:
Both of her legs were eaten by a troll before she died, and as she died, she whispered to Harry, "Not your fault." Check.
Check.
Interesting that Harry uses his med pack he bought in anticipation of almost exactly the scenario which played out when he used it, except that Hermione absolves him instead of cursing him.
The detailed foreshadowing often seems like part of the story, not just as aspect of the story. What is said comes true much more than it should, and in much more detail than it should. "Bitten" is a very specific way to die.
You know, speaking of foreshadowing...
That very quote led into McGonagall's theory that Harry had suffered some kind of trauma and had it Obliviated. And then there was that business with the Remembrall in chapter 17. I'd have to go back and check for more instances of Harry specifically foreshadowing a future event like this, but more and more I'm beginning to think that Harry has forgotten or locked foreknowledge that's leaking into his subconscious.
But in Chapter 17, McGongall rejects the theory that remembralls detect Obliviation.
But, strange that Harry doesn't think to keep experimenting with the Remembrall.
This bothered me as well. It's a mysterious phenomenon that directly relates to Harry's own mental state. He should have been all over that.
It's not going to happen. You don't hang that much drama on an event if you intend to reverse it quickly, unless you're going for comedy, and comedy doesn't make sense in this context.
That said, if you'd asked me a day ago I would have said that there are too many dangling plot threads surrounding her for the story to do what it just did, so it's probably a good idea to adjust your confidence of predictions based on narrative mechanics appropriately.
It sounds like you might be mistaking Eliezer's role in this, and mistaking your desires for desires we can reasonably assign to Eliezer.
This isn't something that happened to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger, this is something that Eliezer, the author did to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger.
He did it for a reason. He's almost certainly been planning it all along. If it made him sad then it first made him sad quite some time ago. He's not feeling the surprised dismay you have today.
He wanted this.
Well. That went poorly.
Harry has direct sensory evidence that souls are real, but it doesn't look like that's updated his sense of what is and isn't possible yet. I feel more and more trepidation.
Not quite the Red Wedding, but close.
Harry knows how smart Quirrell is, and he knows that if it occurred to him that the troll was an attempt on Hermione's life, it would have occurred to Quirrell instantly. We (and Harry) know that Quirrell said nothing to McGonagall, from which Harry will soon infer that Quirrell could have saved Hermione yet did nothing. (Which makes it likely, but not certain, that it was Quirrell who was behind the troll.) In either case Quirrell has reached a point, or is about to reach a point, in his sinister plan where it no longer matters (or perhaps even requires) that Harry take him as a mortal enemy.
Draco (and maybe even Lucius) will most likely infer from the troll incident that Hermoine was not the one who attacked him, and he will align himself with Harry in the coming Roaring Rampage of Revenge. I would not be surprised if Lesath Lestrange also made an appearance.
I'm tentative to make predictions here since, reading through comments, I consider you folks more grounded in rationality, logical thinking and also fictional predictions than me. But I wanted to share a thought and get feedback, so here goes.
My interpretation of the big magical release goes like this: Hermione's brain, experiences, knowledge, magical ability, etc., are programmed via the genetic magic marker to upload into... something. The Atlantean Neural Database, or something like that. We've got reason to believe that magic was artificially created and the genetic marker programmed into people, so that they are capable of interfacing with reality on a far more interesting level than most people. We've also got plenty of evidence to suggest that the brain is, if not fully understood by magical knowledge, more than capable of being interacted with. We have Legilimency and Obliviations capable of accessing memory, thoughts, knowledge, and intentions; the author is capable of working with things WE don't know about because wizarding knowledge is stated to have been lost, so we also have some unknown-unknowns working against us. So the odds of neural magic having existed in ... (read more)
I predict that Harry will save many or all people who ever died from oblivion with magic that reaches backward through time to capture the mind of each person at the point of their death.
I further predict that this magic will create the mechanism of magic, possibly incidentally, and be responsible for the sort of Atlantis that magical Britons believe in.
I speculate that magic and ghosts are unintended byproducts of Harry's Afterlife Immortality Project.
Harry is an anti-death hero. Whatever villains he may encounter, his enemy is death and his heroic victory will be over his true enemy.
The afterlife figures centrally in the original work in ways that are incompatible with the author's worldview. In this way, the author incorporates important elements of the original work without betraying his convictions.
I made this prediction last April, and wish there had already been an admonishment to share predictions like the one involving 75th, yesterday.
Prediction for Chapter 90: Time Pressure, Part 3:
"Wait a moment," you say. "Time Pressure, Part 3? Harry already lost his race against the clock. Why would Chap. 90 be called 'Time Pressures'?"
Because Harry's race against the clock to save Hermione's life has only just begun, and he has slightly less than six hours left. Eliezer mentioned that one of his most significant purposes of Chap. 86 was to update characters' states of knowledge before the next arc. If you recall, in that chapter, Harry learned the word "horcrux." And in Chap. 87, Harry learned of the philosopher's stone.
So what will Harry do? Get the shell removed from his time turner, or obtain a time turner from someone else. Learn about the Horcrux ritual as quickly as possible, travel back in time, get Hermione to create a horcrux, and erase her memory of doing so thus that her death plays out just as before. Then start working on the stone to restore Hermione to life. (He could also take the "bone of the father, flesh of the servant, blood of the enemy" route, but positively identifying Hermione's enemy could be difficult. Lucius Malfoy and Company, who were tricked i... (read more)
*facepalm*
I believe this was specifically put there by Quirrel, who does keep track of muggle accomplishments.
I don't think so. Jumping from 'Quirrel knows where to go' to 'telepathic resonance' seems like a major example of privileging the hypothesis.
Even ignoring the issue that as far as we know from canon & MoR, "telepathic resonance" is a completely unknown and novel phenomenon and that people cannot know Quirrel is homing in on Harry rather than say Hermione or the troll, there are still dozens of more likely explanations: the school wards; troll tracking skills as part of the Defense professor's esoteric & eldritch lore; spy devices planted throughout the school; an Eye ("constant vigilance!") or other snooping devices; the Marauder's Map; supernaturally good hearing; tracking charms placed on Harry (IIRC, didn't Quirrel already do just that with Draco?); information from the future (if notes can be passed about bullies, why not trolls?); ghost/poltergeist/painting messages; etc.
Time Pressure - the arc title - could also be a reference to the book of the same name by Spider Robinson.
Rot 13 Spoilers for Time Pressure and other Lifehouse/Deathkiller novels By SR:
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Yes, but only if he wants it to be an extinction event. I'm reasonably confident that HPMoR Voldemort does not want the same things as canon Voldemort. In fact, I give it at least a 50% probability that "Voldemort" was a false flag operation from the get go to achieve some other goal, e.g. uniting wizard-kind against muggle threats.
It's also possible that to Harry, 'tricky transfiguration weapon' is more mentally available than 'THE KILLING CURSE'. Also, for the same reason, Harry might not have learned it.
I'm pretty sure that was hyperbole.
First, I have to get the emotional reaction out of the way: holycrap!
Now that that's done, is the last time we've heard about the Marauders' Map when Dumbledore borrowed it to search for Tom Riddle? I don't remember off hand whether that was after TSPE or in Taboo Tradeoffs.
I'm a little perplexed at how Harry's medical treatment didn't seem to work; it sounded like it should have bought several minutes, but the action that followed didn't seem like it could have taken more than 60 seconds. I've only read it the once through, so I could be missing it completely, but the timing felt deliberate. (And all the ticks in 88 seem to emphasize the passage of time, though they could well have just been to emphasize the pressure).
Also, Susan knows how to effectively magic giants? That makes her smarter than Umbridge's entire team-to-sack-Hagrid in canon. I suppose it pays to have a competent defense professor (even if he is the most likely suspect for all the awful that just happened), and the director of the DMLE as a close relative.
I was pretty shocked at the Troll in the Dungeon line. That seemed like something that wouldn't be at all likely to happen with a RATIONAL! Voldemort, foreshadow... (read more)
Re Marauders' Map: Quirrell pretty obviously has it. He obliviated the Weasley twins and took it. This is just the smart thing for him to do.
Note how he's burning straight through to the melee with the troll at the end of Ch. 89 - so he knows exactly where and in what direction Harry and Hermione are. This could also be because of the psychic link, but it also increases the probability he has the map.
Wizards have souls. - their minds are running on more than just wetware. I am fairly certain of this, because otherwise shape shifting would be instantly fatal.
My friend and I were emailing about this update. I asked her for her opinion on it and whether or not she liked it. Here are her thoughts:
"Yeeah, I kind of don't. I posted this review on it yesterday (after quietly fuming for a bit):
If this had been Neville or someone, I'd be commending you on how you handled the emotion here, but as it is I was too annoyed and appalled that you were damseling and then fridging fricking Hermione while halfheartedly suggesting she put up an offscreen fight to be able to appreciate it.
I'm not easily annoyed with fridging, or character death in general. In fact, a lot of my favorite scenes in fiction involve my favorite characters dying, and I've always argued that a character of any gender dying as a vital part of the main character's arc is fine. But Hermione had a huge incomplete arc and you've just rendered the entirety of it pointless. This is Hermione, she wasn't as rational as Harry, she tried to be a hero but only made things worse, she was framed for murder and ended up in a huge debt to Harry, which she had plans to try to settle and potential for interesting emotional growth, except whoops, then she died, and nothing ever came of any o... (read more)
I emailed back, and she elaborated:
"Oh, no, my issue is not with the fact that Eliezer killed a female character for Harry's motivation. Like I said, I like character death. I like character death used to put other characters through an emotional rollercoaster. And when people complain that X is sexist because a female character got fridged, that annoys me because while the trend is an issue, there is nothing wrong or sexist with an individual instance of a character who happens to be female dying for a character who happens to be male. It actually kind of surprised me on a meta level that I was so mad - I have never been annoyed by an individual instance of fridging before.
But the issue here is with the context in this particular instance. Your argument that it had to happen this way is flawed, because it assumes the story prior to the exact point of Hermione's death was fixed and out of Eliezer's hands. I don't have a problem with Eliezer killing Hermione, in itself - but if he was going to, he should have either not given her this character arc in the first place or completed the arc first in a way that gives at least some vague kind of closure. He could also have killed Ne... (read more)
He touched it. In chapter 56 or 55, I forget which, Harry had to wear a glove to ride the room that Quirrell enchanted. In chapter 89, he picks up the troll by the ear.
Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be "Beyond The Impossible", take measure of Eliezer's own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal--and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven't even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet.
I mean, it's not like Harry can't extract a perfect copy of Hermione's material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she's ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione's reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Herm... (read more)
Is it just me or has no one in the story really considered that Quirrell = mort? Like, why does the hypothesis that Quirrell = Grindelwald briefly come up first? Why is everyone blindly trusting him even when they think he might be responsible for some of the bad stuff going on? It seems like everyone is doing some serious mental gymnastics to avoid considering that he is actually seriously evil (esp. Hogwarts faculty and Harry).
Yeah. One thing that’s very striking if you read through it while thinking about motivated cognition is just how often words to the effect of “Harry ignored his sense of doom and …” show up. Its really shocking, Harry explicitly and actively ignores a strong sense of doom several times per chapter.
What about all the people who signed up to get frozen after they die?
Do you think Harry would care even the tiniest bit about her losing her magic if she came back to life?
I mean... yes, but not enough to not bring her back to life.
The cure to procrastination?
... On a side note.
Hermione Granger, of House Potter, at great cost to House Potter, was just killed on Potter's watch.
Someone please bet this man.
But you're talking about bringing in people known to fail at rationality due to signaling games. Do you think they can be eventually brought around, or?
Captain Ron would be the ideal choice.
The problem with the Time-Turner approach is that (given what we understand of the Time-Turner's rules) he'd have to somehow fool first-iteration Harry (and Fred and George) in order to avoid a paradox. The Methods universe is full of tales of time-turning gone wrong; since saving lives is one obvious application of the Time-Turner, Dumbledore surely knows exactly what he can and cannot get away with in that respect.
From canon, and from what nearly happened to Hermione, it is clear that one can be sent to Azkaban while innocent.
What do you want to bet on that? I'd assign your hypothesis an around 35% chance.
Why are people here reacting like Hermione is perma-dead?
I get that they'd act that way on reddit, but people here actually believe and sign up for cryonics. Harry's got a whole team of Alcor cryonic specialists right in his wand. And if he can't manage the magic, Dumbledore can. Hermione's soul and magic may have exploded in an impressive lightshow, but her brain is still fully oxygenated and hasn't even begun to decompose.
Everything that makes her her is still doing fine.
(And on a meta level, Elizer knows that fictional examples are strong drivers of behavior. A fictional example of cryonics working would be big for cryonics adoption.)
from http://hpmor.com/chapter/56
Stuffed Into The Fridge, indeed.
High-confidence prediction: Chapters 88-89 are Snape's doing.
from http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/27/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
Note: I'm not sure Snape did it, my instinct is that this is the work of QQ. But Snape has reasons.
Huh. It seems like a lot of people in this discussion are convinced that Hermione is dead and will stay dead. I agree that she is probably currently quite dead; however, I assign a greater than 50 % probability that she will somehow be resurrected.
My prediction: Harry will convince a reluctant Dumbledore to put Hermione's body under some sort of stasis spell (cue discussion of cryonics) while he researches ways to revive her. The resurrection plot will resolve the question whether the HPMoR-verse is reductionist or if there is a body/soul dichotomy (my bet is on the former).
Harry should be screaming at Dumbledore to use his time-turner. There are a lot of options, constrained mostly by the necessity of seeing a Hermione-looking-thing die.
"I've already used it six times today, Harry..."
In HPMOR, time travel obeys the Novikov self-consistency principle (with the exception of liberal use of deus ex machina to keep it from being over-powered). If it were possible for Harry to use a time-turner to save Hermione, she wouldn't have died in the first place.
Someone should cast a chain-Imperius , commanding the victim to:
1) Not attack anyone else subject to these rules 2) Imperius anyone not subject to these rules, and subject them to these rules 3) Inform your enchanter of any plans you know of that might hinder the grand Imperius effort.
It's established in Rowling!Cannon that the spell can be chained, and Harry has probably read the GNU manifesto, so he should have these sorts of ideas.
A liberal arch-wizard might object that this would reduce the entire world to a dull statis of mindless servitude:
... (read more)He now has a ring on his hand without a jewel. He could put Hermione there.
How romantic, in a very... Well, something.
I mean... "keeping your best female friend's dead body on a ring on your finger"...
There's some debate about whether the passage about Hermione's soulsplosion rules out becoming a Hogwarts-anchored ghost. I have offered a bet to chaosmosis (LW, Reddit) on Reddit on this topic - I am skeptical of any ghosts.
See this and just about everything else in that blog's "things I won't work with" category, which is hilarious (though there are a few links you might not want to follow if easily upset, notably the one about dimethyl mercury).
"Mens Rhea!" Is that the spell that makes someone think they're a huge bird that can't fly?
I don't quite see why. Real world contains a lot of those.
Are you objecting to a time travel argument because it is circular?! Of course it's circular, it's time travel. That's the thing about time travel, it makes causal circles. That's why it drives you insane to think about it.
Humans can still be just hardware with a soul. API calls to the cloud.
In a world with immortal souls, Harry's Patronus goes to find Hermione now. Yes, we can invent reasons why that would fail. Its failure would/will still provide more evidence in the other direction.
That is an experimental test I would very much like to see Harry try.
For years, when trying to explain just how easy it is to break D&D 3.5 specifically, my example has always been a 5th level transmutation wizard with shrink item, mage hand, a twenty thousand pound rock and 100d6 of falling object dammage.... And somehow, I managed to not see that coming. I wonder if EY's falling rock idea originally came from D&D.
Or an issue of how most humans are not willing to signal extreme utilitarianism because it is used easily to portray people as cold and hard. Moreover, most humans don't distinguish between "things I say for signaling" and "things I say because I believe them." So there are a lot of reasonable explanations for this without it being mindkilling. Also, some people really are just deontologists. Not being willing to answer such a question makes a lot more sense if one has a deontological rule that rape is always bad and wrong.
It appears Quirrell now believes Harry has used the killing curse. Applying Story Logic, this misjudgement of Harry will lead to Terrible Bad Consequences for Quirrell.
Some ramblings before ch90: Quirrell will not learn the truth of how Harry killed the troll, since Dumbledore will memory charm the Weasely brothers (they saw Harry's patronus) and thus discover that their minds have been tampered with (by Quirrell). Suspecting Quirrell, Dumbledore will also erase the Weasely brothers' memories of how Harry actually killed the troll. Quirrell will not actual... (read more)
Bearing in mind that Eliezer consistently foreshadows important events, let's brainstorm what Harry might do to end the world.
First, ritual magic and Dark rituals have played a prominent role in the story. Dark rituals have been mentioned over and over, and it's been emphasized that they are dangerous and powerful.
A magic ritual, much like a magic potion, seems to achieve much more than a spell. In my opinion this is probably because of the same conservation law by which potionmaking uses a small amount of magic to unlock the power already in some sens... (read more)
Hmm. It seems highly likely that the troll was timeturned back six hours itself in order to prevent people using time turning against it - given the amount of prep work that went into this (sabotaging Hermoine's kit, lifting the map, making her miss that meal. sun proofing it...) it would be a major oversight to not do that. Of course, that limits the suspect pool to people who know about time turning. From our perspective, all relevant suspects do, but in universe, this probably does rule out people. For example, if means Lucius may in fact know that it was not one of his minions getting overly ambitious.
It does, but I interpreted it as Harry having to wrestle himself back towards acknowledging the painful fact of Hermione's injuries, as opposed to flinching away.
I think that in the aftermath of Hermione's death, Harry's breaking the rules and leaving the Great Hall is barely even going to be a blip on the radar. I'd be surprised if McGonagall even brings it up. It seems too callous for her.
Only if he had already been writing a yaoi fic... If he killed off Neville, no one would care and he'd open up a can of plot worms ("why Neville? Why not Hermione?").
Maybe this is the moment to ask why Hermione isn't already the hero of HP:MOR. If the point of HP:MOR is that someone who is smart and rational (and raised by smart/rational muggles) would immediately find a million holes in the Potter-verse, why not start with the character who is already known to be the smart one, and is at least a bit more rational than canon Harry? Sure, there's some issues with the prophesies -- but (rot13 for spoiler) Hayhaqha had a pretty good solution to that.
I count 30 Ticks, and then no more. Why doesn't the ticking continue, as Harry's still in the Great Hall (with the clock) for a while? Is this just arbitrary, or could the amount of Ticks given be somehow important, perhaps the time Harry would have had to arrive earlier in order to prevent Hermione's untimely death?
Moody said the slippery slope was due to killing, not due to casting the curse, and Harry still killed the troll. Quote:
... (read more)Mild evidence against is that Time Turners were (apparently) used to save a life in canon, namely Buckbeak's. Stronger evidence is that no use of a Time Turner in HPMoR has actually altered the timeline; to the extent that there are rules I would expect them to be much more general than that. "Can't save a life" is a deeply inelegant rule. It doesn't cut the universe at its joints.
Why would Harry not send his Patronus to Dumbledore, or McGonagall in order to alert them that Hermione was in danger? Why would he not immediately time-turn (break the shell, it's supposed to be a deterrent and/or indication that you've obviously misused it, right?) before he had more information about what was going on?
I'm more upset now than when I read certain scenes in A Storm of Swords; I suppose congratulations are in order for that, but... damn. Do not want.
Harry has never successfully used a Time Turner to prevent something that has already happened.
It seems ridiculous that Hogwarts doesn't have any kind of PA system, even schools in the 90's had that.
Also, basically no kind of preparation for disasters at all even though they were in the middle of a war 10 years ago. They didn't even do head counts.
The wizarding world doesn't keep track of muggle accomplishments.
I think the elixir of life stops aging, not death from blood loss. Of course, if you can avoid paradoxes, traveling back in time and applying a tourniquet earlier would save her.
Nah, not really. The Marauder's Map is the obvious thing to try when searching for someone in Hogwarts, he wouldn't release any information to the Weasleys. And, of course, Dumbledore does trust the Weasleys. It did suggest the Map to Quirrell as a device he'd want to confiscate, but it's not really in Dumbledore's nature to think that far ahead.
http://xkcd.com/1053/
If there are thousands of inmates at Azkaban, and the wizarding justice system is not always absolutely correct, even if then are only wrong a percent or two of the time, there are tens or even maybe hundreds of innocent prisoners of Azkaban. So, "not the usual outcome", is irrelevant, what matters is the numbers. But of course it doesn't hit as hard, and that is precisely because of the numbers. It is a bug in the human brain that one innocent person being ripped to death in front of you hurts a lot more than tens of innocent people being tortured to death out of sight, especially surrounded by thousands more people also being tortured to death who some say have lower moral priority.
Rita Skeeter came before Dumbledore borrowed the map, and Fred and George's comments on the glitches were in a context where revealing them to be Rita Skeeter would have made sense (or at least, revealing it by now). It's strongly implied that they just paid someone (my guess is Lockheart) to false-memory charm Skeeter. This points away from the same charmer being behind the Rita Skeeter prank and obliviating the twins' memories of the map; the charmer in Rita Skeeter's case is apparently ridiculously competent (one reason I suspect Lockheart), whereas the twins' recent obliviation was fairly crude.
Harry has shown again and again that he can't lose, and instead doubles-down. He did so with Hermione, and now Lucius has killed her. If people realise it's Lucius, all the better for him; nothing can be proved, but he shows himself to be extremely dangerous and willing to protect his family.
That's plausible, but if so, it seems like a very disproportionate response from the Remembrall; that is assuming that under ordinary circumstances Remembralls light up like they do in canon, which I suppose is not necessarily a given.
It was a surprisingly good day because he didn't intend Harry to try to rescue Hermione. Harry was supposed to find out about her death later. He couldn't be absolutely sure her death would have the precisely correct effect on Harry, either. It was surprisingly good because he got Dead Hermione and Dark Harry out of the deal; an expectedly good day would have been just getting the former.
Fred and George give Dumbledore the map way after they bust Rita Skeeter, so they had to have remembered the map existed for at least that long.
I'm betting Hermione is really, really dead (though Harry may yet resurrect her). However, remember that writing a story is often the inverse of reading it. It's like solving a maze by starting from the goal and working backward to the beginning: often much easier.
If (big if) Hermione is resurrected and/or not really dead, then Eliezer very likely started from a narrative goal of having Harry see Hermione's horrible but fake/reversible death and then worked backwards from there to make it happen. As readers we have the much tougher task of working forward ... (read more)
McGonagall is savvy enough to know that the current defense professor is at fault for something like this; Quirrell pushed his luck in manipulating her into taking the actions she did, including providing him a single point of false-memory charm to an alibi for whatever he needs to do (including stealing a time-turner, meeting his future self, confirming that everything appears to will have gone well, and then going back to set up the scenario in the first place).
ETA: And even if it wasn't Malfoy & co, it is believable that they would think it was one of them.
We find out he didn't trust Quirrel (as he tells Snape in flashback to keep an eye on Quirrel), I don't think we find out he knew Quirrel was being possessed by Voldemort.
Thanks. It's rather obvious once you point it out. Not the first time my self-centeredness has blinded me to the real reason people were cross with me, won't be the last.
Censorship is necessary. The poison that kills your garden and undermines your movement won't always be the new blood or the outsider. Sometimes it will be someone you respect who steps out of bounds.
"Time Pressure" is a pun! Somewhere previously, prophecies were described as being caused by a sort of pressure built up on time, and TP2 ends in a prophecy.
A close read indicates that he probably hasn't - he seems to be somewhere in the middle of Hogwarts, burning through walls, and abruptly stops once the troll is killed, and not actually present. And while he does respect Harry's ability, an AK is probably the most parsimonious explanation for 'how did Harry just kill an enchanted adult troll in a few seconds?'
Let me use this opportunity to re-raise a question I've been puzzled about for awhile now: how does Harry win?
According to an author's note, we have "two major story arcs" left before the fic is finished. Eliezer also mentioned possibly doing a "solve this puzzle or the fic ends sad" thing, but implies he's at least going to give Harry a chance to win.
It's not certain what "two major story arcs" means in terms of story time, but it seems very likely that it at least means "before the start of the next Hogwarts school year... (read more)
This line has actually been changed to:
(at the end of ch6)
It doesn't take away from your point, just remarking that there are some details in the early chapters that have been changed.
While I'm putting it at over 90% that Hermione will be resurrected somehow, someway, it doesn't need to be in his first year.
And we never did hear back from her on that topic, did we?
In HPMOR, portkeys do not work in Hogwarts (chapter 63).
I think it is supposed to be Harry - before a voice said that, the text simply blanked out, refused to state what the troll held or the troll dropped. After the text explicitly states the state Hermione is in, then we get Harry's statement about fire and acid.
? I wasn't aware cryonics had ever been done on someone that's already alive.
EY, you are one thousand times worse than Joss Whedon.
It's implied that Quirrel expects Harry to have used it. It's what Quirrel should expect and even want, if he is behind the troll.
(TVTropes warning!)
It was (dark) humor. Hyperbole. Of course he's not going at 0.003c!
Awww, I would have said it was (light) humor.
Quirrell can feel Harry's emotions. This can partially explain at least some of the cases when he unexpectedly realized what Harry was thinking (for instance, this probably gave him some information during their conversation about Parseltongue). It might be worthwhile to find all cases when they talked and Harry attempted to hide his emotions.
The thing is that PTSD is really not that binary, like many mental illnesses, it has a wide range of symptoms and severity levels. What Nancy is talking about is how one death can push one drastically over, skipping much of the middle range where it might be ambiguous if one had symptoms severe enough to be diagnoseable. (Disclaimer, while I've heard the same sort of things NancyLebovitz is talking about, I'm not aware of any studies actually supporting this.)
it opens at 9. he can go back as early as 3Pm.
He'd already thought "action.run: twins get eaten". so...yeah.
His inability to influence Harry through the link does not reflect an inability to influence him at all. His influencing the everloving fuck out of Harry in Defense Class.
The part where he can't use magic on Harry is more of a poked hole in this theory, though. I can answer it, of course, but not without raising more questions. I'll think about that one.
Quirel has often stated his dislike of Harry holding back because of silly things like "morality" and "what others might think of him". As Draco said in an early chapter: when confronted with a complicated plot look at what ends up happening and assume it was the intended outcome. Harry went fully into his dark side, switched off his censors and killed the troll in about 5 seconds. Even if Harry stayed behind in the Great Hall and learned about Hermione's death later it would still make him go to his dark side like never before. This b... (read more)
In canon "Troll" was defense layer number.. 5? Anyone in that deep can fairly be considered to be asking for it. If this is the case, the naive reading of events is that it got loose because someone was cracking the defenses...
If we're talking about the story as a whole, sure. If we're talking specifically about the two incarnations of Ch. 85 (which I was), let me quote:
... (read more)Thank you for providing the subhuman masses an example of warmth and love. I am truly touched by your radiating compassion.
Question: how emotionally plausible do people find Harry's reaction to Hermione's death?
In the Sorting Hat chapter, Eliezer gave us a very strong hint that Harry would very nearly turn dark at some point in this fic, and by the end of chapter 87 it seemed all but certain.
All the stuff pointing in the Harry-going-dark direction up til this point has felt very emotionally plausible. But... "He would rip apart the foundations of reality itself to get Hermione Granger back"? I'm having a hard time buying it.
And it invites some unflattering compariso... (read more)
I didn't see Harry going supervillain there. His thoughts seemed consistent with his overall goals so far: "become omnipotent and rewrite reality because I have some objections to the way it works now". It was just more dramatically stated this time. Because Harry was, you know, upset.
Let me be more specific then.
*Dumbledore has had the intention of creating the boy who lived since before Harry's birth and likely, before his parent's marriage.
*Dumbledore has access to many, many more prophecies than anyone else and has been using this fact for decades.
I already knew about it when I read DKA's ClF3 chapter.
Of course, if you can transfigure as fast as Quirrel can, you might be best off with a transfigured Iron Man suit.
The name apparently originates in some exposition from Moody in Chapter 86 that Eliezer chose to elide. It appears the exposition is covered up by this line:
Of course, but the story has been very high on foreshadowing and low on red herrings to date, so I suspect that will continue.
Dungeon Keeper Ami? Dude, just read Ignition by John Clark.
... (read more)Without getting into a tiresome analysis of identity theory, Quirrell is currently almost entirely Voldemort, while Harry has a little of the devil in him.
Does this sound like someone polyjuiced into Hermione to you?
I don't think this new prophecy is going to make his day.
What was he going to do when he got there in time?
The paragraph before that one suggests that Quirrell was trying to keep Harry alive. It seems to imply that he was trying to get to the battle in time to ensure that Harry does not get himself killed.
It's not obvious to me how to fake the soul releasing. It was perceived by the magic-sense, not just with the muggle senses.
I thought it worked by size? I'm pretty sure that was stated earlier in the story. And I'd imagine that a boulder like Harry's father's rock could be roughly a similar size/wight/mass to a 12 year old girl.
While I agree with the rest of the comment, this part is strictly false. We know that Harry can sustain a transfiguration roughly like that indefinitely, as evidenced by his father's rock.
God damn it.
Ineffectual only if Quirrell helps, right?
The following is wild 5am speculation.
And so the theory changes shape. Previously I had thought that there were multiple pieces on the gameboard but now I fear this is not so. Hermione Granger has been Legilimised into harm's way until destroyed and that has in turn destroyed Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. He is no longer a game-piece but is the final stage of nothing more than an experiment, set into place by He Who Must Not Be Named (and indeed cannot be named, as his real name is so old it has no meaning to anyone or anything but his faintest memories... (read more)
Dumbledore teleported by pheonix. I don't think a disguised death eater could do that.
Thank you for saying this. I've been hoping someone would make note of this. Don't people remember the fight with the bullies in ch 73?
... (read more)Trigger warning: comparisons involving rape
If you (generic “you”) must compare being raped to being cuckolded, you don't get to compare the least bad case of the former (“gentle, silent rape” of an unconscious woman leading to no physical injury, no STD, no pregnancy, and no memory) with one of the worst possible outcomes for the latter (your wife gets pregnant, gives birth to a child, and you never find out it's not yours until you've spent a bajillion dollars).
(I wish I could downvote myself.)
Edit: from the upvotes and the asterisk, it looks like I had a... (read more)
The Agreement Theorem is a consider-a-spherical-cow sort of result; its preconditions are absurdly strong. (In particular, the fact that the agents concerned are required not only to be perfect Bayesian reasoners but to have common knowledge that they are so.)
But even without Aumann one might hope for better agreement than we actually see...
Amelia Bones isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
... (read more)When someone is controversial for the sake of being controversial, it would be foolish for them to not anticipate consequences like no longer being accepted in mainstream company. Or ever company one or two standard deviations of 'daring' away from the mainstream in some cases.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but I wouldn't tell someone who believed to to be so that I had stron... (read more)
Going by your description of your friends, I'm inclined to agree.
Given that this universe settled on an explicit message about not messing with time, and given how much magic apparently involves naive mental entities, it seems like anthropomorphizing the laws of physics is a much more useful heuristic in the HP universe than it is in ours.
I don't understand how Quirrell could possibly be behind the troll situation, given that he apparently didn't know where the troll would be and had to resort to extreme measures to get to the scene quickly, instead of conveniently waiting just nearby.
What with the timey-wimey shenanigans in the writing and her brain not having spent too much time "dead" yet, I'm suspecting Hermione will yet live.
What with the show and Dumbledore's diagnosis, I'm suspecting Magic will continue to think her dead and thus her career as a witch being over (pending Harry hacking the Source of Magic).
Plus repercussions of the "Do not mess with time" kind.
Why would Dumbledore enchant the troll against sunlight if it was going to be in the third-floor corridor all along?
To defend it against anyone with a sunlight-generating spell or who has some acorn potion handy.
If he had been willing to do that, he wouldn't have received "do not mess with time".
Though I notice I'm confused as to how, exactly, the universe can figure out he'd create a paradox in this situation without actually running the computation to see what happens. Probably it can't. Probably time-travel is hilariously unethical.
Given that a bunch of people in the Great Hall should know about the fact that one can send messages via patronus, it's a bit unlikely that no one of them thinks about sending a patronus to Minerva.
Harry is also quite stupid for sending the patroneus to Hermonine instead of addressing Dumbledore who could use the time turner (in Harry's perspective) and who also can go directly to Hermoine via Fawkes and is able to fight the troll. But then Harry thinks that he's the hero who has to do things himself, so that can be forgiven.
We could certainly expect Min... (read more)